
A two-part documentary about the fraught relationship between Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky and émigré linguist Roman Jakobson.
Self (archive footage)

A two-part documentary about the fraught relationship between Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky and émigré linguist Roman Jakobson.
2009-07-01
0
Founded in 1947, “Group 47” made half‐yearly authors read publicly and endure brutal critique, launching postwar German literature (including Nobel winners). Its 1967 end still influences writers; veterans recall its power, while Kehlmann and Biller debate a modern equivalent.
7.6A film about the noted American linguist/political dissident and his warning about corporate media's role in modern propaganda.
0.0Recorded readings of Swiss writer Robert Walser's late texts and micrographs join with documentary tableaux of his long array of residences, leaving behind a disembodied image.
6.8On January 31, 1857, the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) took his place in the dock for contempt of public morality and religion. The accused, the real one, is, through him, Emma Bovary, heroine with a thousand faces and a thousand desires, guilty without doubt of an unforgivable desire to live.
6.1In 1991, American Psycho, the third novel by controversial writer Bret Easton Ellis, provoked heated discussions among critics and readers alike; an extraordinarily disturbing book that transported its readers into the mind of Patrick Bateman, a cynical mergers and acquisitions executive obsessed with brands, inconsequential details, pop culture and brutal murder.
7.82017 marks the centenary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century - the Russian Revolution. Using the private journals of Pierre Gilliard, tutor to the Romanov children, this film is an intimate and eye-opening account of the Russian Imperial family in those days of turmoil. How did they get through their days? How did they perceive their lives as their world crumbled around them?
6.7Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the first politicians to congratulate Donald Trump on his election as president of the United States in 2016, but over time the relationship between the two heads of state has had its ups and downs. Are they friends or enemies? Has their mutual admiration turned into mutual distrust?
0.0Stefan Zweig was the most read author of the German language in the 1930s. He believed in a united, peaceful Europe and travelled most parts of the world. He was a pacifist and was torn apart by to the cruelties and horrors of the second World War. He committed suicide in Brasil. This documentary tells the story of his life.
0.0It is said that Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez never allowed for a film adaptation of his singular masterpiece 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', arguably the most influential novel in any language of the second half of the twentieth century, to be produced. However, the prolific Colombian writer had strong ties to the movies.
0.0October 23-26, 2002 – one of the many bloody periods in the modern history of Russia. And the most terrible days for people whose relatives and friends have become a bargaining chip in this tragedy. What were all these lives worth, cut short overnight by a horrific crime? What do the fates of the survivors mean to a state that ignores their pain? What do they mean to a people for whom "NORD-OST" is just a terrible combination of words?
0.0A documentary about Antti Jalava, a Swedish-Finnish writer who was among the first to write about the immigrant experience in Sweden.
6.6The Picture of Dorian Gray, the seminal work of Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), continues to find new readers and inspire artists and creators around the world more than a century after its publication in 1891, because it was endowed with all the elements necessary to make it an undisputed heritage of world literature.
0.0The prodigious genesis of a monument of world literature, too often reduced to its popular success, also recounts the tormented conversion of its author, Victor Hugo, to the ideal of social progress.
6.3The end of the Cold War did not bring about a definitive thaw in the former republics of the Soviet Union, so that today there are several frozen conflicts, unresolved for decades, in that vast territory. As in Transnistria, an unrecognized state, seceded from Moldova since 1990. Kolja is a silent witness of how borders and bureaucracy shape the lives of citizens, finally forced to lose their identity.
7.5An in-depth look at the Canadian rock band Rush, chronicling the band's musical evolution from their progressive rock sound of the '70s to their current heavy rock style.
0.0Cormac McCarthy has spent the last 25 years writing his novels at the mountain top retreat of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. An institute dedicated to the formal analysis of complex systems. In this documentary filmed at the library at SFI (and in the desert), Cormac in conversation with his colleague David Krakauer, reflects on isolation, mathematics, character, and the nature of the unconscious
0.0A woman who has become part of literary heritage, the only French writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 2022, she has made her life the basis for her work since the publication of her first novel in 1974... What can be said that her books haven't already said? On the occasion of her grand return to her hometown in Normandy, as she explores the places of her early childhood, this icon of several generations looks back on her youth and what made her the committed woman and writer she has become. Through a geographical and narrative journey covering her first 25 years, which resonated throughout the following 60 years, the film—the only one she has agreed to participate in since winning the Nobel Prize—offers a "different" portrait of Annie Ernaux, interweaving her personal memories, her writings, and the history of the 20th century.
8.0The extraordinary life and career of the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, a brilliant and charismatic, but also rebellious, favorite son of the Soviet Union.